Violeta Bermúdez Valdivia *
1. Aproximaciones desde el enfoque de los derechos humanos
P: I am not going to Central Station and scream “I am bisexual”. I mean, not everyone needs to know it. (…) You know, it was different when I came out as transgender. I just came out of the closet and told nearly everyone that I am trans, without getting any questions from them. I came out as transgender without a reason, even on my CV and motivation letters. But this gave me a headache. I am just too exhausted to tell everyone. If they have any questions, ask me. That’s the same when it comes to my bisexuality. They can come up with questions and I answer them. I can’t lie. But.. I am not going to say “I am this, or I am that”. (Kelly, Amsterdam)
This paper has shown that people find it difficult to disclose their bisexuality. Participants find it difficult, if not impossible, to create a bisexual display as there is no practical understanding of what bisexual behaviour is and what bisexual doings are; mononormativity, heteronormativity, and compulsory monogamy are three general understandings that render bisexuality invisible in Dutch society. These general understandings prevent people from constituting, learning about, understanding, and imitating bisexual practices outside the bedroom. Bisexual people only seem to be able to express their bisexuality using verbal clues (sayings) in which they articulate bisexual practices such as desiring people of more-than-one gender or being attracted to people of more-than-one gender. The question is, however, whether people want to disclose their bisexual identity and/or desire.
The excerpt from Kelly, a bi-cultural woman from Amsterdam, provides a good summary of the stances of the participants towards disclosing their bisexuality and the importance of teleoaffectivity in people’s everyday lives. The phrase “not everyone needs to know it” suggests that Kelly does not find it relevant to scream her bisexuality from the rooftops. Kelly has also learned from previous experiences in which she continuously came out and expressed her transgender identity. She ended up being exhausted, but until that point it was relevant for her to do so. Nowadays she does not proactively come out or express her gender identity and social and medical transition but only talks about it when it comes up. Similar, her bisexuality is not relevant in large parts of her everyday life; she does not want to make it a big deal. It only is important for Kelly to disclose her bisexuality when people ask about her sexual attraction and identity. Not because her bisexuality itself is important – it is not an end to disclose her sexual identity or attraction – but because she just does not want to lie to other people. In the end, Kelly’s expressions of bisexuality are a means to reach
certain ends; these expressions manifest the need to be honest and the wish to be valued as an honest and authentic person.
Kirsten McLean has suggested that most bisexuals do not actively disclose their bisexuality in everyday activities or spaces, and gay and lesbian communities in order to prevent harm (2007, 2008). Similar, James McLean (2003) concludes that many bisexual men consciously manage different identities in different spaces. Harm reduction can play a role in people’s not disclosing their bisexuality, but only provides a partial answer to why people do not disclose their bisexual identity. My research suggests that the vast majority of participants do not actively assume membership of a bisexual community or social group (see Maliepaard, 2017b; also Lingel, 2009); often because they understand that it is not acceptable or appropriate to discuss their sex lives in their daily practices; sexuality is often, for instance in most working practices, confined to the private realms. As the previous sections show, teleoaffectivity (i.e. people’s moods, emotions, stances, wishes, needs) plays a crucial role in the sexual identity negotiations of research participants.
These outcomes have an important impact on the identification of bisexual spaces as the sexual coding of spaces relies on verbal, non-verbal, and material clues – or appearances to paraphrase Hubbard (2008) – in which sexuality is expressed. As people rarely disclose their bisexuality and/or desire in everyday practices it is difficult to identify bisexual spaces. In fact, none of the objective spaces that I explored in this research, exist as a permanent or even sustained bisexual space. Even the home/household is not a bisexual space for everyone, or a safe space to explore and express ones bisexuality (see Gorman-Murray, 2008a, 2008b and Valentine et al., 2003 for discussions on home and family as complex spaces that might challenge or empower people’s non-heterosexuality) as Irina’s example reveals. It is therefore no surprise that bisexuality and bisexual people remain invisible in most practices (Maliepaard, 2017b). including in working practices, and, thus, workplaces. Bisexual participants, however, now and then disclose their bisexual identity and/or desire at work, school, or while participating in other everyday practices. These disclosures are seldom long conversations, and often not more than just a casual remark, answering a question, or participating in a short discussion or conversation on sexuality or sexual attraction. It means that bisexual spaces, conceptualized as spaces of bisexual appearances, exist as highly temporal and specific spaces.
In their introduction to their 2007 book Geographies of Sexualities, Brown, Browne and Lim (2007) conclude that sexuality structures or governs our everyday space. This article takes a slightly different approach by arguing that practices, which constitute spaces (in line with Hubbard, 2008), predominantly govern sexuality in space, including the verbal, non-verbal, and material clues that express certain sexual identities, desires, attractions, and/or norms. Such a focus is in line with Schatzki’s theory of practice as it means understanding practices as the primary unit of analysis to understand both the lived experiences of sexual subjects and
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the sexual coding of space. It also means that the spatiality of sexuality is constantly changing in the interactions between the practices – in particular their practical understanding and teleoaffective structure – and individuals’ agency (their teleoaffectivity) while participating in practices. I am convinced that this focus on practices, teleoaffectivity, and appearances aligns with Browne’s (2006) approach to queer geography, which renders categories of sex, gender, sexualities, and space fluid, and Hubbard’s (2008) focus on how sexual norms are maintained and performed in space through appearances.
Focusing on people’s doings and sayings in everyday practices, as well as on the practical understanding, general understandings, and teleoaffective structures of these practices, and connecting these doings and sayings with the sexual coding of spaces offers a next step to analyzing the production and fluidity of sexual(ized) spaces. It is, as this study shows, not only important to focus on sexual practices or on othering practices, i.e. heterosexualization practices (see Browne, 2007; Hubbard, 2008), but also on the organization of working practices, family practices, nightlife practices, and so on to understand how sexual practices and sexuality are governed by these everyday practices. Analyzing the teleoaffective structures may provide more insights into the norms, values and expectations of everyday practices and what is understood as (un)acceptable, (in)appropriate, and (ir)relevant in particular practices (and, thus, spaces). Inspired by Nicolini, who reminds us that ‘practices constitute the unspoken and scarcely noted background of everyday life [and] always need to be drawn to the fore, made visible and turned into an epistemic object in order to enter discourse’ (2009, p. 1382), I believe that thick descriptions of practices and of people’s doings and sayings are necessary to better grasp how sexuality and sexual norms are maintained and performed in practices and to get a more detailed understanding of the complexities and dynamics in the sexual coding of spaces.
To conclude, spaces only get a bisexual appearance when people agree upon bisexual practices and when people recognize these practices as bisexual practices. As Schatzki contends, a practice only becomes a practice when the participants ‘express an array of understandings, rules, and structure’ (2008, p. 106). Only through language people can articulate bisexual practices and give spaces a bisexual appearance. To conceptualize bisexual spaces as spaces of bisexual appearances stresses the temporality, specificity, and spontaneity of these bisexual spaces. It also implies that bisexual spaces are the result of people’s know-how, embodied experiences, skills, and conscious decision-making in everyday practices. As such, this conceptualization of bisexual spaces aligns with recent geographical work that focuses on the fluidity and complexity of sexual spaces and how spaces become sexualized and are experienced as sexualized. Finally, and related, this research has shown that conceptualizing sexual spaces as based on sexual appearances, expressed in doings, sayings, and actions, may provide a more accurate account of the constant dynamics in the (re)production of sexual(ized) space in everyday practices.
Notes
1. I did not observe fear of rejection by native Dutch participants, however, one man feared negativity from his father and two women experienced denial by their mothers. Several participants argued that discussing their bisexuality with their parents would feel inappropriate or uncomfortable because they never discussed sexuality or relationships before or do not have “that kind of social relation to discuss their sexuality”.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank all 31 research participants for their time and willingness to participate in this study. I am very grateful to the three reviewers for their comments, editor Robert Wilton for his extensive feedback, and Roos Pijpers for critically reading earlier versions of this manuscript.
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